Where I come from carrots always went with apples. I remember my grandma grating an apple and a carrot and giving it to me in a glass like the best snack ever. So I just had to come up with a cake recipe that would marry these two sweet friends.

This cake has no added fat, no butter, no oil. The only fat comes from egg yolks and a tiny bit from flour. I calculated the nutritional information of this loaf dividing it into 12 slices. I learnt that each slice should have around 120 calories and just 1 gram of fat so that is pretty amazing. I am not advocating to remove fat from your diet but if you have to, for some reason, this is a cake you can still eat. So there. Enjoy this delicious, very low fat treat!

Ingredients:

3 eggs

3/4 cup sugar

3/4 cup applesauce

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/3 cup all purpose flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp ground cardamom

1 cup grated carrots

1/2 tsp fresh ginger (optional or can be replaced with dried ginger)

1/4 cup raisins (optional)

Preheat the oven to 160C/320F.

Prepare a loaf pan.

In a bowl of an electric whisk place eggs and start beating on high speed.

Keep gradually adding sugar and beat until the mixture is perfectly smooth.

This mixture will not stiffen as there are yolks there, so the whites will stay liquidy.

Winter is getting closer and everybody starts talking about kale and putting it in recipes, right? They have a point, since kale is in season now and it is the least bitter when grown in cold temperatures.

And, as I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to nutrition, I went ahead and checked that kale has some amazing amounts of vitamin K, A and C. If you make this soup and eat it and then want to feel extra, especially good about doing it, have a look at this link. It explains a lot about the benefits of kale. World’s Healthiest Foods – Kale

The beans aren’t just a filler either, I used lima beans and found some awesome info about them on that website. Have a look for some info on whatever beans you use.

This is a recipe for a hearty, warming autumn soup. Even though it does not contain meat, it leaves your belly satisfied and full.

This amount serves 4.

Ingredients:

2 Tbsp olive oil

1 onion, finely diced (I use a food processor)

2 cloves of garlic, minced

3 potatoes, peeled and cubed

1 carrot, cut lengthwise and then chopped

1 vegetable stock cube

2 celery stalks, chopped

1 tsp Herbes de Provence

1 tsp marjoram (use oregano if you have no marjoram)

1/2 tsp salt

1 can white beans (lima/haricot/navy, whatever is easiest to get)

2 cups kale, finely chopped

1 1/2 liter water form the kettle

salt & pepper to taste

In a pot, heat the olive oil and add onion and garlic. Let cook for a couple of minutes until the onions soften.

Add the cubed potatoes and carrots. Stir to coat with oil and continue cooking for another 5 minutes.

Pour the water in and follow with celery, herbs and bring into a rolling boil. Cook for 15 minutes or until the potatoes are almost ready.

Add kale and drained and rinsed beans and cook for 5 more minutes, just enough for all the flavours to blend.

Check the taste and add more salt if needed. Season with freshly ground pepper.

This is another one of my bread pudding recipes. It’s easy, quick and seems just like a cake. So take your day-old stale bread and put it to some delicious use. This pudding is packed with lemon zest which gives it some amazing aroma and flavour. Your body will also be happy for all that vitamin C you’ll be having in the cold & flu season. Either way, even if you never get colds and never have leftover stale bread, it’s worth making this pudding for the delicious experience.

Ingredients:

8 slices of day-old stale bread

4 eggs

3 Tbsp applesauce (oil if you have no applesauce)

2 cups milk

1/2 cup sugar

zest of two lemons

optional: a drop of yellow food colouring

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.

Cut crusts off your bread and discard them.

Chop the bread into small pieces and place in a greased baking dish.

In a bowl whisk eggs, applesauce, milk, sugar, zest and colouring if using.

Once well blended pour the mixture on the bread pieces.

Press the bread with a fork until every piece is submerged in the mixture.

This is a recipe for an honest, delicious pound cake, which freezes well, so I often double the recipe below and make three small loaves, of which two go to the freezer as soon as they cool down.

I am using the term ‘pound cake’ loosely since the original pound cake is supposed to have a pound of butter, a pound of sugar and a pound of flour and I am way off that with my measurements. I use different proportions because I never make cakes that sweet and because I never put so much fat in them, since I substitute at least half of it with applesauce. Still, a delicious cake, be it pound cake or not. The trick here is to properly aerate the mixture, you can do it with a kitchen robot or, like me, treat this as your daily workout and whisk with a hand whisk. Works both ways and you can get great muscles. 🙂

This loaf has a well established lemon flavour, all delicious in your mouth. You can skip the lemon completely and use a teaspoon of vanilla essence if you just want a plain loaf.

Ingredients:

3 eggs

1/2 cup applesauce (replace it with oil, if you have no applesauce)

1/4 cup rapeseed oil

1 cup sugar

zest of 2 lemons

juice from half a lemon

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/3 cup milk

1 1/2 cup all purpose flour

Do not preheat the oven.

Mix flour, baking powder and salt and set aside.

In a large bowl whisk the oil, applesauce and sugar until smooth and fluffy.

One by one add eggs while continuing whisking.

Add the lemon juice and zest.

When everything is well blended, start adding the flour, alternating with milk and keep whisking until the dough is smooth.

I come from Poland, where when I was growing up, Halloween was heard of but certainly not celebrated. I am just that old. And I remember very well, when I first saw Halloween in Chicago, what a shock that was, all these pumpkins and skeletons out on people’s lawns seemed such overkill. Awesome overkill, I must add. And I remember as well, my first Halloween in Ireland, when a coworker showed up in a full pirate costume to his office job. I barely knew what to say, that’s how surprised I was. There were more people showing up dressed up that day and some years later I was happily dressing up with them too. I have absolutely nothing against Halloween. It’s an awesome, happy holiday.

But I am just totally inexperienced in it, and I often feel like I don’t understand it. So whenever I try to do something for Halloween, I feel like I totally don’t know what I am doing. For this year’s Halloween post, I wanted to make muffins with red cream cheese filling. It was supposed to look like blood. Blood in muffins, I don’t know. Is that a good idea? Or not at all?

So I started experimenting and whatever I added to cream cheese, it came up cute, pastel pink colour, which would be great for a 4 year old girl’s cake or something. Not the colour of blood, certainly. I tried red food colouring, until I ran out of it, I tried cherry juice, red currant juice. Forget it, I ended up with cutsie pink muffins.

And that was my best idea anyway…

So I decided that I should stop pretending that I know anything about Halloween and trying to make something I don’t know how to make. This is too much BS. So instead, you’re getting this recipe: banana pancakes. They are sweet, delicious, they taste like bananas and you can eat them on all days of the year, Halloween or not.

Ingredients:

3 ripe bananas

4 eggs

1/4 cup flour

icing sugar for decoration

1 Tbsp oil or butter for frying

Peel bananas and mash them in a bowl until more or less smooth. Add eggs and flour and whisk until the mixture is uniform.

Heat the butter in a pan and pour the dough in small portions. These pancakes are best when they are not too big and not too thick. Small pancakes are easy to flip and stay in one piece much easier.

This is a recipe for breakfast muffins featuring some yummy kale. They will not be very aerated and light because you have the banana, apple and kale but they are guaranteed to be delicious. I am only using 1/3 cup of sugar for this recipe which makes them sweeter than a slice of bread but definitely less sweet than a cake or a dessert muffin. So if you’d like some dessert muffins, go ahead and increase the sugar to half a cup. Or go with another one of my recipes for muffins.